E-Malt.com News article: USA, CA: King Harbor Brewing opens doors in Redondo Beach

Born and brewed at the beach, Redondo Beach’s first craft brewery may also be the most accessible of the seven that have popped up in the South Bay since late 2009 in the quickly fermenting industry, Daily Breeze reported on March 27.

King Harbor Brewing Co. opens its doors on March 29. Its flagship beer is fruit-inflected pale ale dubbed The Quest. The craft brewery is located in a light industrial strip mall.

The three partners behind King Harbor Brewery settled on the location when they were unable to find a suitable location in south Redondo Beach near the landmark for which the business is named.

“The idea was to be as close to the beach as possible,” said co-owner Tom Dunbabin, 30, a Hermosa Beach native. “But we still wanted something that was accessible by bike, by walking, something that would still be a destination, but something the casual passer-by can also find and come in. ... This is the perfect commuter spot.”

So it’s just as well that Dunbabin, brew master Phil McDaniel, 30, and Will Daines, 28, will focus on lower alcohol session beers.

But about the only thing the brews in production — the pale ale and a brown ale — have in common is their relatively low alcohol content that checks in at 5.9 and 4.7 alcohol by volume respectively.

“We love great beer and we like drinking a lot of it,” Dunbabin said. “You can have a couple of them and still ride your bike home. But we’re not sacrificing anything to make a session beer.”

Indeed, while one goal is to make a beer low in alcohol, another is to ensure they don’t taste like one.

So McDaniel sought out largely unknown hops that pair well with unusual ingredients.

The pale ale, for example, is made with New Zealand rakau hops that complement the subtle fruit note that comes in part from the real blueberries used in the beer. Their second beer, a rich Abel Brown that has the characteristics of a porter, is made with Arabica coffee beans that has McDaniel suggesting with a straight face that it makes a “great breakfast beer.”

“These hops are so unknown we want to experiment with them, so we don’t want to just go all out and do a year’s worth of production with one hop we’re not very familiar with,” he added.”

So the plan for the pale ale, for example, is to rotate different hops and pair them with local ingredients every couple of months to create a changing flavor profile built around the same basic recipe.

By summer, a third beer will join the small array of offerings — a citrus saison made with the herb lemon verbena.

The limited number of beer styles is a conscious decision driven partly by marketing as well as practical considerations given the limited production facilities that are gradually ramping up in their 3,600-square-foot location.

“A lot of bars become overwhelmed when a brewery shows up and says, ‘We’ve got 10 different beers, which one do you want?’ ” Dunbabin said. “It’s tough for them to make a decision. So we made it easy. We made one really great beer out of the gate.”

The Quest is available in about two dozen South Bay and Harbor Area locations between San Pedro and Manhattan Beach (and one place in Downey, where McDaniel lives).

Dunbabin and Daines met through their beach volleyball-playing girlfriends — now their fiancees — when the two learned their future husbands shared a goal of opening a craft brewery.

It turned out Daines had a business plan for a brewery he had hoped to open in Florida that fell through when his business partners pulled out.

Dunbabin, an electrical engineer by education, knew the local landscape and had watched as the craft beer industry gradually evolved in the South Bay. Six craft beer breweries have popped up in Torrance and El Segundo since late 2009 and others are being eyed in communities like Carson, Inglewood and San Pedro.

The pair raised $500,000 relatively quickly with three South Bay bar owners and 14 other silent partners providing the needed capital investment.

McDaniel, who has brewed at San Diego County’s Stone Brewing and Orange County’s The Bruery, was recruited.

Now they have a working brewery they built largely by hand and a modest lineup of beers.

“It was a whole lot easier than we expected,” Dunbabin said. “We took a lot of the variables out and focused on the beers we loved.”


28 March, 2014